According to a recent Linux Foundation study, Cisco is already contributing to Linux and currently represents 0.5 percent of changes (which is a good number). I would expect that with the AXP in the market, Cisco’s contribution rate will go up.

Now, I don’t work on AXP or anything related to ISRs, so I have no idea what those groups plan to do with respect to Linux, but it was somewhat amusing to see the Linux Foundation report cited to show how much work CIsco does on the kernel.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this study cited to show what a kernel development powerhouse Cisco is. In the report, Cisco is credited with 442 commits to the kernel; however, more than 400 of of those commits are mine, and about 30 are Don Fry maintaining the pcnet32 net driver. So if you take away my work on InfiniBand/RDMA, Cisco’s contributions to the Linux kernel are pretty minimal.

I’m not sure if I have much of a point except that I wish we really did have more than one or two isolated developers at Cisco really engaged with the upstream kernel.